Sophia Lillis: meet the teenager on the brink of stardom

Sophia Lillis is a bit of an old soul. She has a penchant for the word “rather” that doesn’t quite chime with being an 18-year-old who lives in Brooklyn. If she didn’t work so much, she would take up pottery classes. And she isn’t much for going out – even when the world isn’t in lockdown. It all seems a bit coy for a teenager on the brink of stardom.

Related: I Am Not Okay With This review – teen angst just got terrifying!

Lillis is in the midst of building an impressive résumé. She had her first big hits playing a younger Jessica Chastain in Stephen King’s 2017 thriller, It, and a younger Amy Adams in Sharp Objects in 2018. The following year, she landed the lead in Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase.

Lillis was seven when her stepdad first asked her to star in his class film project. But it wasn’t until she was in high school, finishing the filming of It – her first feature movie – that she finally figured out she wanted to act long-term.

Now she is starring the Netflix adaptation of Charles Forsman’s I Am Not Okay With This. Lillis plays Sydney Novak, an awkward 17-year-old coming to terms with her sexuality while getting over her dad’s suicide. Plus, Novak just so happens to have superpowers that are triggered by intense feelings – like a modern-day Matilda, but less PG.

I caught up with her to discuss her life in isolation now that she’s off set and stuck in New York for the foreseeable future. If we were able to meet in person as planned, we would have gone to Lillis’s favorite Brooklyn diner. She would have ordered pancakes or waffles and a side of sausages, and a vanilla egg cream (seltzer, milk, whipped cream and syrup, in case you were wondering).

Instead, we meet over Zoom, of course, but she tells me she still got dressed up for the chat. For her, that means swapping out two-day old pyjamas for one of her more colorful outfits (she usually just wears black) – a black top with flowers on it and a scraggly yellow jacket. Her characteristic short, ginger hair is tucked behind her ears and she’s wearing a huge grin on her face.

In I Am Not Okay With This, that ear-to-ear grin is normally seen whenever her best friend, Dina, is around, because she is in love with her. The rest of the time Sydney Novak can be seen fuming, watching the contents of store shelves, libraries and entire forests come crashing down at the behest of her uncontrollable teenage emotions. They are dark, deep, contorted. So contorted, in fact, that Novak ends up accidentally blowing somebody’s head off at the end of the series.

I ask her about her own real-life emotions: is there an emotion she would get rid of given the chance? “Oh God, my anxiety. I have this tendency to just rethink things from five years ago like over and over,” she says.

Over Zoom, Lillis does not come across as anxious. She laughs at how her friends are unfazed by her acting career (“I dunno why, they just never seem interested … they’re more like, ‘Let’s go hang out at the park and have a picnic,’ rather than, ‘Let’s go out and party with all these famous people around,’ that kind of junk,” she says). She tells me she is “horrible at socializing” but she doesn’t seem that way to me – deprecating, yes, but in a quietly self-assured kind of way. She seems at ease with herself.

I also didn’t find her to be “horrible at interviews”, which she thinks she is. At most, she is a little nervous, but well prepared. Lillis says she has learned to deal with some of the pressures of fame by prepping. Before interviews, she anticipates what questions she might be asked and writes her answers.

Lillis gets anxious about social interactions. She tells me she looks up to her twin brother, Jake, because she sees him as being effortlessly sociable. That’s a stark contrast to how she sees herself, which is why she asks him to chaperone her to press parties, in case someone comes over to speak to her.

“I feel like with him I can talk freely. I can talk to him, so it looks like I’m socializing, and if there’s someone who actually comes up he can help speak for me,” she says.

She outsources nearly all of her social media management to him, too, which may explain why it doesn’t feel all that personal – aside from brief snapshots of her smirking behind her ugly, hairless cat’s head, you don’t see much of the real Lillis on it. It is mostly a tonne of promotional material.

“I am always terrified … Whatever you post, there’s always something wrong with it,” says Lillis.

So, I ask, what would people see if they saw the real Lillis? “I really haven’t had a very exciting life other than maybe making films,” she says. In fact, the most social thing she has done lately is play Animal Crossing on her own at home: “You basically just build a town, that’s all there is. You build a town and go to other people’s towns, and actually that is mainly how I have been socializing [during the quarantine].”

Most of the characters Lillis plays onscreen are troubled – abused, neglected, grieving. I ask her what experiences she draws on from her life to pull out the angst that her characters go through. “Almost all of [my characters] are in the process of growing up. Everyone has hardships, no matter how large or small, so I just try to use as much of those as possible.”

But in her real life, Lillis is very protected. Her mom is close behind her in all of her work ventures - from arranging interviews, to choosing appropriate jobs. She hangs out in the background of our Zoom chat when we speak.

“I feel like at least 80% of my job is supported and/or done by my mom,” says Lillis. “She helps me with my lines, reads through ’em with me every single day. She helps me choose the jobs, she reads the scripts beforehand and then sends them over to me,” she says, adding: “There’s not a moment when she’s not helping me.”

At the end of the school year, Lillis will graduate high school and plans to focus on acting instead of going to college. She may even get a place of her own near her family home in Brooklyn.

“I know my mom is probably going to step in like, every two days, to make sure I’m still alive. Probably in the midst of doing so, [she will] get angry with how messy it is and then clean my room and make me make myself dinner,” says Lillis.

Is it ever too much? I ask. “No, not really,” says Lillis. “If anything, it’s mostly her needing a break from me,” she says. It’s hard to tell whether you’re getting the full picture when her parents are right there. But perhaps that’s the point – Lillis is in her formative years and suddenly has found fame and all the excess that comes with it. And yet, she has managed to stay out of the limelight for anything other than being a hard-working, sort of goofy and lovable actress. Why mess that up now by saying the wrong thing?

“I don’t have real reasons for strife,” she tells me. “I can get kinda anxious sometimes, but then again making movies can be sometimes stressful because I want to do well and not screw up for everybody.”